DEVELOPING AFRICA

The New York Times has an article by Celia W. Dugger called U.N. vs. Poverty: Seeking a Focus, Quarreling Over the Vision.

This article has a very intersting quote:

"The thing that shocked me personally was that they're trying to shift and change goal posts,"
said Charity Kaluki Ngilu, the Kenyan health minister, who is in New York for the meeting. "If
this is the case, we African leaders might as well go home and find other methods of developing
ourselves."

Mrs. Ngilu does add that she likes some aspects of President Bush's program that helped Kenyans increase the number of patients being treated for AIDS by about two thousand percent - no small compliment, for a Republican adminstration that is often accused of indifference to AIDS and to Africa.

Mrs. Ngilu, who said she was stunned by the Bush administration's initial position, added that none-
theless, she credits Mr. Bush's anti-AIDS program with helping Kenya to increase the number of
people being treated for the disease to 45,000, from 2,000.

Mrs. Ngilu's other statement, "..we African leaders might as well go home and find other methods of developing
ourselves" - is that a threat or a promise? While economic help from abroad is doubtless useful, helpful, and morally imperative in some ways and to some extent, I am afraid that American advice to make a functioning legal system that guarantees legally enforceable contracts and that crimes like theft and bribery will be punished, for African governments to carry out economic policies that encourage their people to work and to study by having them know that they will be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and especially to stop fighting all these crazy civil wars in which African countries seem to indulge - I think this advice is worth more than sending cash over there. "Finding other methods of developing ourselves" - other than what? Receiving charitable donations from abroad? Hard work and serious study under the protection of benign governments sound better to me.

European governments are more willing to give cash, and they do in fact give more money as a percentage of their national products, then is the United States, But if the Europeans would drop the CAP crap, they could keep their cash, because they would be doing much more for Africans, as well as for Europeans, than they do by sending them money.

CAP stands for Common Agricultural Policy. It means that the European Union collects cash from European taxpayers and redistributes it to European farmers. CAP takes is the biggest single item in the EU's budget. It subsidizes farms, and above all French farms, that are basically uneconomical. It takes money from countries that have small percentages of their population on the land, like Germany, and gives it to countries, most famously France, where bigger percentages of the people farm. CAP raises European prices for food enormously; Europeans pay MUCH more for meat, vegetables, and fruits than do their American cousins. CAP is one of the ways in which France exploits and abuses the EU for its own purposes.

Europeans are so full of good deeds for the Third World, and giving aid makes them feel almost as happy as they do attacking Israel and the United States, but the damage they do to Africa more than cancels out the bundles of cash they send. Foreign aid, which is after all mainly in the form of cash, has a strange tendency to end up in the pockets of corrupt African politicians, anyway.

Bad as this distortion of its own market is for Europeans (other than French farmers and the politicians who want their votes), it prevents African farmers from developing themselves in the free market. If Adam Smith's kind of common sense prevailed, much of Europe's food would come from African countries today. Africans depend heavily on agriculture; they have less in the way of modern service industries and factories. They can produce agricultural goods far cheaper than can Europeans. Were the market allowed to work in its natural way, African agriculture would profit, and Europeans would eat and drink for less than they now do. The growth of African agriculture would create a class of African entrepreneurs who truck it to ports, capital would be built up, people would have more of a stake in building than in destroying, and everybody would benefit.

So, if Mrs. Ngilu wants to complain about how foreign countries are not helping her continent, let her go to Brussels, with a side trip to Paris, to yell.

And then she could happily and productively go home and find "other ways to develop her country", knowing that her people will have a real place in the world economy, other than as recipients of aid.